Interesting links and notes on updates to my main website.



[to search, use Blogger search in top bar]

Ottawa city rant

Property tax hikes to hit residents of trendy urban core

Homeowners in Ottawa's urban core face a hefty tax hike next year, while those in suburban and outlying areas could possibly see a drop in their property taxes, in light of new property assessments mailed out this week.

Well, that seems fair.
Mine went up 12.9%.

You know what I find interesting?
Copenhagen, with a population of 500,000 core and 1.1
million extended, has
- bus system
- downtown train system
- subway
- bicycle lanes everywhere, with thousands of people
using them
- pedestrianized streets downtown
- everything within walking distance anyway

while Ottawa has
- bus system
- diesel train running a short route that council
hates
- some bicycle lanes, with not so many people using
them
- Sparks Street, somewhat failed pedestrian street
- crazy-ass aboveground electrical train scheme scam
plan

I like this concept of "the new downtown".
Having screwed up the real downtown, they have now
decided the downtown is in Le Breton tar ponds or
Bayview,
or basically anywhere outside the city core.

I also like this "if you build it, they will come"
commuter transit idea. "Let's build inaccessible
things, so we'll have to have transit to get there."

Councillor, MP back LeBreton for museum
Science museum in prime spot would hasten establishment of commuter rail, Holmes says

Not so fast on new library

I have a crazy idea. Why not build a central library... in the f-ing centre.

In the giant beautiful train station they closed down, for example.

They have a perfectly good report recommending they
spend a $300 million on a new library but oh no, we're
poor, we'd rather do some cr-ppy-a** public-private
baloney partnership that gets us some ugly tiny
building thirty minutes from downtown that ends up
costing $500 million.

Oh but wait, the great minds in council did bless us
with the giant f-ing greg borg cube luxury condos next
to the Chateau Laurier. That's a good use of prime
downtown land.

Actually, to call it a borg cube insults the borg, who
have more interesting detail on their cubes.

city council = wankers

That's it, I'm going to Europe. posted by Richard at 17:26 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

travel and technology

Mixed results.

Watched Galactica in the Toronto airport, went well.

Tried to listen to audiobook on the plane, but it turns out the plane is really loud.
What? I SAID THE PLANE IS REALLY LOUD.
I could barely hear it with iTunes and the iBook set to maximum.
I was able to hear enough for it to lull me into sleep so that was fine.

Multi-adapter thing from Radio Shack turned out to only be for non-grounded plugs.
The iBook does have both a long grounded plug and a short non-grounded adapter, but I had only brought the former.
Bought a grounded multi-adapter at Copenhagen airport.

Watched The Daily Show on laptop on my way home.

I've bought some noise-cancelling headphones, we'll see how they work.
I got RCA HPNC300 because they looked to be the best ones at my neighbourhood Radio err the Source whatever.

Upon reviewing the reviews upon return, they got really slagged in CNet but got ok mentions elsewhere.


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5239401/site/newsweek/

http://tinyurl.com/836xw

incidentally, it was quite the battle in Google trying to find any reviews other than the CNet one, I went through six pages of stores trying to sell me the headphones

The Bose ones get the best reviews, but they cost like $600 or something.
Also getting good reviews are the sound isolation ones, these are basically earplugs with speakers inside, but I don't want to have to jam things way down my ear. posted by Richard at 17:12 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

everyone talks about the weather

weather forecast
25°C 25°C 12°C 12°C 2°C 11°C

+25?
in October?
yesterday I think it was like +28
WTF

You know what I like? +15.
Nice steady +15.

Instead I get: +30 +30 +0 -15 -30

stupid Ottawa Global Warming weather posted by Richard at 04:59 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)